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So smart and yet so stupid

Global Warming for the Two Cultures by Richard Lindzen

Prof Richard Lindzen, a giant of the skeptical debate delivered the 2018 Annual GWPF lecture this week talking about two cultures of two different educated elites. Those at the higher intellectual level may be more prone to groupthink than ordinary folk…

The two different kinds of elites and a vast gap between them

Lindzen quotes C.P.Snow who was both a scientist and a writer and who lived in both elite worlds — the scientific and the arts.

C.P. Snow felt only 1 in 10 of the most highly educated in the western world had even a basic grip on physics:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have […]